


because that's what he is

by utrinque_paratus



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Angst, Big Spoilers - proceed with caution, During Lies Sleeping, F/M, Gen, Missing / Additional Scene, Nightingale is terrifying, POV Third Person, Spoilers for Lies Sleeping, because BA robbed us of reactions by Peters friends, pov Sahra Guleed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-05
Updated: 2019-01-05
Packaged: 2019-10-04 19:20:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17310380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/utrinque_paratus/pseuds/utrinque_paratus
Summary: Sahra had never truly understood why Michael only referred to Peter’s governor as ‘The Nightingale’.Until one particularly hot and sticky and overall fucking miserable day in the summer of 2015.





	because that's what he is

Sahra had never truly understood why Michael only referred to Peter’s governor as _‘The Nightingale’_.

He had used the title in their first proper date; they had just finished eating and their conversation was wading into the deeper, more metaphysical aspects of both of their lives.

“Why the special name?” she’d inquired.

Everything she had received was a mystically drawn up eyebrow, and the even more mystical and at the same time very unhelpful answer: “Well, because that’s what he is – to us, anyway.”

“Us?” she’d asked, even if she had a pretty good idea about what his answer would be. She’d been spending enough time with Peter to have gotten a concept about the magical world and its beings – or, as her governor would put it, the ‘weird bollocks’.

Michael gave her a shrewd smile, the corners of his mouth tilting up and his bright eyes sparkling in a way she’d found herself to be falling in love with very fast.

“Us. The magical community – the demi-monde, and any other _shùshì_ ,” he said, while bringing a glass of white wine to his lips, “or, as the Isaacs prefer to say - practitioner.”

“The Isaacs?”

And so it went on for the rest of the evening, and with far more interesting subjects coming to light, Sahra almost forgot.

After the confrontation in the underground parking space at One Hyde Park, however, and her having witnessed a performance of Nightingales’ metaphysical prowess first hand – despite being very distracted at the time, but still, it wasn’t like you could just _ignore_ drillheads made of ice shooting over your head – she remembered, and thus simply asked Peter when they were both sitting in UCH, waiting for some well-deserved oxygen treatment and her side persistently stinging.

Right where the bullet had scraped across her waist.

Because there is nothing like a near-death experience to suddenly start speaking about the most unimportant and random things.

Peter, who happily took her cue as a reason start babbling off his residual adrenaline, had been far more informative - even if, under the cut, it hadn’t been anything what Sahra couldn’t have thought about herself. A thing about respect for his extraordinary skills, Peter had been quick to explain; also about tradition and reputation – which his boss had had a lot of time to build up before, during and after the Second World War.

Sahra had guessed from the very first meeting in a cellar in Soho that there was a lot more to Thomas Nightingale than what might have met the eye, so she hadn’t been particularly surprised at the age-reveal.

Still, she did not understand, and thought the title to be more of a relict of the past, before Peter had dragged the man back into the present and spotlight – a legend that grew over time and by exaggerated stories being passed from mouth to mouth; a myth - that never had had any effect, at least not on her.

Until one particularly hot and sticky and overall fucking miserable day in the summer of 2015.

It happened after the third repetition of the fifteen-seconds long video; CCTV footage, gathered from Wetherspoon’s and Holborn, running in a loop on a smartphone a Constable had pressed into DI Miriam Stephanopoulos’ hands, showing DC Peter Grant getting into a fake police car, which, right afterwards, was putting on the blues and speeding out of the area the camera had captured.

There was no doubt now. Peter had been abducted – by Lesley May and Martin Chorley, also known as the Faceless Man; wanted for multiple murders and crimes against humanity.

Sahra could not exactly recall if it were Stephanopoulos hands, or her body trembling, as the strangely blurred and shaky screen suddenly blackened.

She could feel the formae and signare, then; a warped burst of such powerful, _painful_ , _flaming_ magic, barely controlled – incomparable to anything she had ever sensed since she started to learn from Michael.

The phone was flung out of Stephanopoulos hands by an invisible momentum and smashed against the next best stone wall with a velocity only projectiles from semi-automatic pistols should be able to reach. It literally exploded into its components by the sheer force of it.

In the dead silence that followed, Sahra was able to hear sand trickling over the floor, and an unsteady exhale – by whom, she could not determine.

The Constable who had brought the smartphone had, wisely, fled the scene.

Slowly, both Stephanopoulos and she were turning towards the man standing beside them. The only thing Sahra properly remembered feeling in that moment was a very funny sense of relief that Seawoll hadn’t been nearby, but was back at Belgravia nick - or the situation would have escalated right there and then.

The things which betrayed Thomas Nightingale, for all his show of stiff upper lip, were his skin, stretched white over the knuckles of his clenched fists; and his eyes, holding a storm of grey clouds.

“Miriam,” he said, the voice as cold and clipped as she had ever heard it, “I’ll give you and Alexander full power over apprehending and re-interviewing everyone who might have or had a connection to Martin Chorley. You do not need to confer with me first. Take _absolutely_ every action that is deemed necessary by your judgement.”

Before Stephanopoulos was given the chance to answer, Nightingale turned to her.

“Sahra, meet me in the atrium in twenty. We are going to start with the Chestnut Tree.” It wasn’t a question.

At the edge of her awareness, she could still see the formae building and being twisted down at the same time; the flames tightly held to the core of the signare - a cold, iron cage of control around the fury. It hadn’t lost the feel of power and pain emanating from it, though.

“If there is anyone in the demi-monde who knows anything about where Chorley might have his hideout, they will answer,” Nightingale continued, before abruptly turning away and marching down the hallway – to make calls to the Courts of both Mother and Father Thames, Peter's parents, and finally, Bev herself, as Sahra learnt later.

There had been reports of small floods along the whole length of her riverbed the very same day.

The next, the goddess of the Beverley Brook turned up before the doors of the Folly and had demanded entrance into the Tech Cave. No one had dared to turn her down; just like nobody of the demi-monde had refused to answer when the Nightingale came bearing down on them in the search of his apprentice.

Sahra was sure that none of them had risked lying. No one would be foolish enough to draw the Nightingales’ wrath upon them - not when you could feel the hidden flames like this, just waiting for a single reason to turn into a firestorm and to let hell loose on everyone and everything standing in his way to find Peter.

Suddenly, the title took a meaning, and then she finally understood.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on tumblr.  
> My first FanFiction posted on AO3, and the very first I've ever written for the Rivers of London Fandom! Lies Sleeping was truly a powerhouse of a book with a lot of emotions - but sometimes, we were just robbed of reactions/reunions/hurt&comfort and with this, I intend to fill up a sorely missing scene (the limitations of a First Person POV *sigh*) - how did Peters friends react to him being abducted by Chorley and Lesley, especially Nightingale?
> 
> Please note that English is not my native language - if you find any grammatical/spelling errors, feel free to point them out to me.


End file.
